Postgres FM

Nik and Michael are joined by Salma El-Sayed and Kirk Wolak to discuss their in-progress and very ambitious Google Summer of Code project around adding Btree Merge support to Postgres.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• Salma El-Sayed https://postgres.fm/people/salma-el-sayed
• Kirk Wolak https://postgres.fm/people/kirk-wolak
• Google Summer of Code https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com
• PostgreSQL GSoC 2026 project ideas https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC_2026
• CMU Intro to Database Systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjYMAgsGH-GtY5rJYZ6zjsd5
• Kirk, NIK, and Andrey’s Hacking Postgres sessions on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH8y1BNPAKjKDdJA7sDmFWUkbbYux3TRz
• B-tree Index Bloat Reduction - Approach & Questions (Hackers thread, with patches) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CANBEAPFq3YAOydjUS3xwcUG9L6e3WE5Z4nGPk_Q3RsjSFWTJNA%40mail.gmail.com
• B-tree merge visualizer https://kirkw.github.io/explainers/btree-merge-explainer.html

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Nik and Michael are joined by Sai Srirampur to discuss ClickHouse's new managed Postgres service.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• Sai Srirampur https://postgres.fm/people/sai-srirampur
• ClickHouse Managed Postgres https://clickhouse.com/cloud/postgres
• ClickPipes https://clickhouse.com/cloud/clickpipes
• walshadow https://github.com/ClickHouse/walshadow
• pg_clickhouse https://github.com/clickHouse/pg_clickhouse
• ClickHouse PostgreSQL powered by Ubicloud https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/clickhouse-postgresql-powered-by-ubicloud
• Hacking Postgres logical decoding sessions https://hacking.postgres.tv/topics/logical-decoding/ 
• wal-rus https://github.com/ClickHouse/wal-rus
• pg_createsubscriber https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-pgcreatesubscriber.html

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Nik and Michael discuss hot_standby_feedback — what it controls, whether and when read replicas should be changed to on, and other settings you can change to help too.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• hot_standby_feedback https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-replication.html#GUC-HOT-STANDBY-FEEDBACK
• hot_standby_feedback: experiments on PostgreSQL 17 (by Nik) https://console.postgres.ai/shared/brief/6018f69d-8975-48e3-8259-a72c77105572
• Best practices for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL replication (blog post) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/best-practices-for-amazon-rds-postgresql-replication/
• log_autovacuum_min_duration https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-logging.html#GUC-LOG-AUTOVACUUM-MIN-DURATION
• max_standby_streaming_delay https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-replication.html#GUC-MAX-STANDBY-STREAMING-DELAY
• WAIT FOR LSN https://www.postgresql.org/docs/19/sql-wait-for.html
• transaction_timeout https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-TRANSACTION-TIMEOUT
• Hot Standby Feedback should default to on in 9.3+ https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20121130190227.GJ3957%40awork2.anarazel.de

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Nik and Michael are joined by Shaun Thomas to discuss estimating work_mem, memory management in general, and writing an extension to help.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• Shaun Thomas https://postgres.fm/people/shaun-thomas
• work_mem https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-resource.html#GUC-WORK-MEM
• pg_stat_database https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#MONITORING-PG-STAT-DATABASE-VIEW
• ALTER ROLE SET configuration_parameter https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-alterrole.html#SQL-ALTERROLE-PARAMS-CONFIGURATION-PARAMETER
• hash_mem_multiplier https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-resource.html#GUC-HASH-MEM-MULTIPLIER
• Recent Postgres releases with 28 CVEs fixed https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-186-1711-1615-1519-1424-and-19-beta-3-released-3365/
• Systemic Risks in the Managed PostgreSQL Industry (part 1 of 6, Mehmet Ince) https://mehmetince.net/part-1-6-systemic-risks-in-the-managed-postgresql-industry-extension-risks-are-real-exploiting-postgis-memory-corruption-bug-at-neondb-supabase-and-many-more/
• Improving Postgres Connection Scalability: Snapshots (blog post by Andres Freund) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/improving-postgres-connection-scalability-snapshots/1806462

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Nik and Michael are joined by Michael Malis, co-creator of pgrust, to discuss their Postgres rewrite, including reliability problems, compatibility testing, faster analytics, and a new JIT-compiled query engine.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• Michael Malis https://postgres.fm/people/michael-malis
• pgrust https://github.com/malisper/pgrust 
• The four horsemen behind Postgres outages (blog post by Michael Malis) https://malisper.me/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-postgres-outages
• Rebuilding Postgres for faster analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD (blog post by Michael Malis) https://malisper.me/how-we-made-postgres-hundreds-of-times-faster-the-query-engine/
• kani https://github.com/model-checking/kani
• Antithesis https://antithesis.com
• fsyncgate mailing list thread https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAMsr%2BYHh%2B5Oq4xziwwoEfhoTZgr07vdGG%2Bhu%3D1adXx59aTeaoQ%40mail.gmail.com
• How AI Changes the Economics of JIT Compilers (blog post by Michael Malis) https://malisper.me/how-ai-changes-the-economics-of-jit-compilers/
• Umbra DB https://umbra-db.com

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Nik and Michael are joined by Radim Marek to discuss MVCC, including his recent article on how Postgres chose to implement it compared to other systems.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• Radim Marek https://postgres.fm/people/radim-marek
• BoringSQL https://boringsql.com
• PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's (blog post by Radim) https://boringsql.com/posts/mvcc-bad-bad/
• PostgreSQL MVCC documentation https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/mvcc-intro.html
• PostgreSQL Storage Internals series by Radim https://boringsql.com/guides/postgresql-storage-internals/
• PgQue https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque
• The next ten years of Postgres (talk slides by Álvaro Herrera) https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfde2026/sessions/session/7744/slides/866/edb-keynote-pgconfde-2026.pdf
• Episode on RegreSQL https://postgres.fm/episodes/regresql
• DryRun MCP https://github.com/boringsql/dryrun

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Nik and Michael are joined by Tudor Golubenco, CTO of Xata, to discuss their architecture, progress, and open source tooling.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• Tudor Golubenco https://postgres.fm/people/tudor-golubenco
• Xata https://xata.io
• Xata is now open source https://xata.io/blog/xata-is-now-open-source
• DBLab Engine https://postgres.ai/docs/database-lab
• pgstream https://github.com/xataio/pgstream
• Xata acquires Privacy Dynamics for advanced anonymization https://xata.io/blog/xata-acquires-privacy-dynamics
• Tonic AI https://www.tonic.ai
• A thousand Postgres branches for one dollar https://xata.io/blog/a-thousand-postgres-branches-for-1
• pgroll https://github.com/xataio/pgroll
• CloudNativePG https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg
• PGSimCity https://nikolays.github.io/PGSimCity
• DeltaX https://github.com/xataio/deltax

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Nik and Michael are joined by Qian Li and Peter Kraft to talk about DBOS, an open source platform for durable workflows built on Postgres. 
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• Qian Li https://postgres.fm/people/qian-li
• Peter Kraft https://postgres.fm/people/peter-kraft
• DBOS https://www.dbos.dev
• Temporal https://temporal.io
• Gadget's use of Postgres https://postgres.fm/episodes/gadgets-use-of-postgres
• Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY blog post from Recall AI https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-listen-notify-does-not-scale
• Postgres 19 commit that improves LISTEN/NOTIFY, avoiding waking backends that have no need to process the notification messages https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=282b1cde9
•  PgQue https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque
• pg_durable https://github.com/microsoft/pg_durable
• Absurd https://github.com/earendil-works/absurd
• LISTEN/NOTIFY performance considerations (docs patch submitted by Nik) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAM527d8oDVb2K%2BtTjpjLkd7g14HLDiwwnvv%3Drcn4BMEs%3DMatkQ%40mail.gmail.com#1b6fa752a96aad22bd8ef794fbaf3ea1

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Nik and Michael are joined by Fabrízio Mello to discuss his new extension pg_stat_log.

Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• Fabrízio Mello https://postgres.fm/people/fabrizio-de-royes-mello
• Timbira https://www.timbira.com.br
• PlanetScale https://planetscale.com
• pg_stat_log https://github.com/fabriziomello/pg_stat_log
• Custom Cumulative Statistics (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xfunc-c.html#XFUNC-ADDIN-CUSTOM-CUMULATIVE-STATISTICS
• Custom Cumulative Statistics (wiki page) https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/CustomCumulativeStats
• logerrors https://github.com/munakoiso/logerrors
• pgFouine https://www.postgresql.org/ftp/projects/pgFoundry/pgfouine/pgFouine
• pgBadger https://github.com/darold/pgbadger
• pg_stat_checkpointer https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#MONITORING-PG-STAT-CHECKPOINTER-VIEW
• pg_wait_sampling https://github.com/postgrespro/pg_wait_sampling
• RFC: pg_stat_logmsg (patch proposal by Joe Conway) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/89742024-d51a-c66b-90b9-67f837072cd2%40joeconway.com

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork

Nik and Michael are joined by David Steele to talk all things pgBackRest.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned: 

• David Steele https://postgres.fm/people/david-steele
• pgBackRest https://pgbackrest.org
• pg_basebackup https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-pgbasebackup.html
• Barman https://pgbarman.org
• pgmoneta https://github.com/pgmoneta/pgmoneta
• WAL-G https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g
• Return pg_control from pg_backup_stop (patch proposal) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/86436ff9-eb98-4c8a-825e-3bcae022107b%40pgbackrest.org#e36e2ad2f410d1a9a1152e36aa66bb48
• Add StorageReadMulti for prefetched multi-file/range reads from object stores (pgBackRest change that needs review) https://github.com/pgbackrest/pgbackrest/pull/2783
• pg_hardstorage https://github.com/cybertec-postgresql/pg_hardstorage
• Why the cycle of open-source sustainability needs to be virtuous (blog post by Gabriele Bartolini) https://www.gabrielebartolini.it/articles/2026/04/why-the-cycle-of-open-source-sustainability-needs-to-be-virtuous
• ARIN https://www.arin.net
• Stefan Fercot https://pgstef.github.io/about
• pgBackRest sponsors at the time of recording: AWS, Supabase, pgEdge, Tiger Data, Percona, Eon, Xata, Dalibo, Data Egret

~~~

00:00 – Intro & pgBackRest origin story
03:07 – Could pgBackRest live in Postgres core? Why it hasn't happened
11:37 – Primary vs. standby backups & corruption safety
20:36 – Measuring RPO & RTO in practice
26:20 – Checksum performance & S3 storage class tips
30:02 – Standby replay bottleneck
35:12 – Log shipping, streaming replication, and sharding
44:56 – Maintenance reality & the sponsorship crisis
47:41 – What's next: repo-to-repo backup & RPO-zero streaming
56:00 – Incremental backup
1:05:01 – Reliability philosophy
1:10:05 – Second maintainer, community growth & wrap-up

~~~

What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

~~~

Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With credit to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork